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On Friday, the Toronto Argonauts play the biggest game of their long, bedraggled season, and if they lose the season’s over. It’s not being talked a lot, really — not with a fringe Maple Leaf trying to claim he got a PED from an inhaler despite that PED being banned for human use in most of the world’s countries; not with the Raptors playing flawed, winning basketball; not with whatever else is going on. There is always something else going on, it seems.

And so the Argos sail through choppy waters, and can’t be seen from shore. They admit playing in the Rogers Centre, where they’re third-tier tenants at best, and went 48 days without playing at one point, takes its toll. They admit the string of practice facilities — they practiced everywhere but a parking lot, it felt like, before getting a home at Downsview — was trying.

Oh, and the injuries. There were a lot of injuries. By the way, star quarterback Ricky Ray won’t be around Friday against Ottawa. Concussion.

“Par for the course, maybe?” said head coach Scott Milanovich, with a laugh that he tried not to make bitter-sounding.

But as the season is on the brink, the franchise has bigger problems. The Argonauts are currently trying to negotiate a lease for BMO Field with Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. MLSE won’t buy the team, not anymore; a lease could work, though. If the Argos don’t get into Phase II of the BMO expansion, though, they’re more or less on an ice floe. BMO, or bust.

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The gaps remain significant, though there’s more optimism of late. There’s the $10-million gap where the federal funding was supposed to be, and which someone other than MLSE will have to cover. There is the fact that Rogers, one of the two corporate giants running MLSE, is hostile to the very notion of the CFL, which is a huge TV property for its media rival and MLSE partner, Bell. There are some other problems that have to be solved.

Neither of the principals, MLSE Tim Leiweke or Argos owner David Braley, want to talk about their negotiations, though the men seem to get along very well. Braley thought they had a deal to sell the Argos to MLSE earlier in the year, according to sources with knowledge of the negotiations, but there was a gap then, too. Now, it’s a lease, but even that’s not easy. Heavy lifting, is how it’s described.

And sources say the Argonauts have five months, maybe four, to get a deal on a stadium done, with everything in place. Anything beyond that and they get kicked out of the Rogers Centre in 2017, and don’t have anywhere to play. Pressure’s on.

This has been going on all season. Business operations were all but frozen in anticipation of a sale, and people left the organization because of it. Players wondered whether re-signing with a franchise clouded with uncertainty was wise. It’s been a mess, all in all.

“I wasn’t around the franchise in the other dark years, when there were owners who couldn’t pay the bills, and on and on,” says team president Chris Rudge. “And I’m sure that every one of those was a crisis on an order of magnitude, in the context of those days, just as great as some of the issues we’ve faced this year.

“But it has been very difficult. There have been a lot of dark clouds hanging over us, because of the delay getting a practice facility done on time, they you layer on the unknown of where we will be playing in 2017, and then the ownership situation.

“So when you have those dark clouds hanging over an organization, both on the business side and the football operations side, it makes it very difficult for the front-line leaders to provide a vision of success, to provide direction, to provide security of employment, to create strategic plans, etc. You can’t do any of those things the way you ordinarily would, because you’re on a moving playing field all the time.”

“These guys have weathered a lot, this team,” says Milanovich. “I told them last week, before the Montreal game — somebody had asked me the question, are you disappointed in the season you’d had? And I told the guys last week, considering everything they’ve been through, I was proud that we were in the position we were a week ago, to possibly beat Montreal and have a chance to win the East.

“We’re not going to use the excuses — you can point to Calgary and very quickly see what can happen, through injuries. But for the most part the guys have been professional, and they’ve fought through it. We don’t believe our season is over, and I told them this is their last chance to keep the dream that we all have alive, which is to be champions at the end of the year.”

If the Argos win, they could get to the Grey Cup, maybe. But if they get into BMO, the stakes are bigger. This franchise has never been less of a topic; as Toronto sports has become a game of giant corporate muscle, they are adrift, and don’t fit. Maybe BMO Field lets them fit. Cheap tickets, a stadium by the lake, a franchise Braley can sell that, with 20,000 fans a game, could even make money, they say. All they’re shooting for is to save the Argonauts, once and for all.

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